Explainable software

Software systems should not remain black boxes. In this talk we show how we can complement domain-driven design with tools that match the ubiquitous language with visual representations of the system that are produced automatically. We experiences of building concrete systems, and, by means of live demos, we exemplify how changing the approach and the nature of the tools allows non-technical people to understand the inner workings of a system.

Software appears to be hard to grasp especially for non-technical people, and it often gets treated as a black box, which leads to inefficient decisions. This must and can change.

In this talk we show how by changing our tools we can expose the inner workings of a system with custom visual representations that can be produced automatically. These representations enhance the ubiquitous language and allow non-technical people to engage actively with the running system.

We start from describing experiences of building concrete systems, and, by means of live demos, we exemplify how changing the approach and the nature of the tools allows non-technical people to understand the inner workings of a system. We then take a step back and learn how we should emphasize decision making in software development as an explicit discipline at all layers, including the technical ones. This talk is accompanied is relevant for both technical and non-technical people.

About Tudor Gîrba

Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).

He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.

These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.

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